Wondrous Wikis

Lent is here. It’s a long season, all the way from Ash Wednesday to Easter that does not exactly inspire many modern day Christians. In this fast moving world, we lack the patience for a season of such length. We prefer the one day beano, like Christmas, Easter, or (at a pinch) Pentecost. Sometimes we [...]

This blog started as an experiment to explore various methods of internet communication. I registered the domain in November 2000 as a present to myself to celebrate the birth of my daughter. Over the next few months I tried a variety of things: forum systems, wikis (I really thought that wiki was going to the [...]

Those fine folk at RealClimate, the blog run by a group of working climate scientists, have come up with another splendid idea. RC Wiki is
an index for debunking of various popular media occurrences of climate-related nonsense. Articles are sorted by where they appear (outlet and country), or alphabetically by author. Under each article you [...]

Our friend Bene Diction points us to Conservapedia, a new wiki intended to challenge what it sees as anti-Christian anti-American bias in Wikipedia.
Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if [...]

After a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth I’ve succeeded in upgrading the script that runs Compass, the Christian wiki. This should further improve resistance to those horrid spammers who’ve been so troublesome. I haven’t managed to crack a problem with uploading images and I’d be grateful for any technical advice that might [...]

After taking a battering by the efforts of those horrid spammers, my enthusiasm for the wiki format has been revived. Thanks largely to the efforts of a splendid user, Compass has been restored to a useful condition. I’ve made a few changes that should make life more difficult for the spammers: now I need to [...]

Turbulent Cleric gives us one of Isaac Watts’ finest hymns. Could you sing it with a straight face?
From the other end of the political spectrum, Peter Glover is to launch a new website which will “present the case for global warming de-hyping and non-alarmism”, which sounds like it is going to be fun. Peter really, [...]

The founder of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is launching a new wiki. Called Citizendium, the new site will still offer public editing but there will also be a system of vetting by which articles will be marked as ‘vouched’ after they have had expert eyes cast over them. Editors will be [...]

A study by the journal Nature has compared the accuracy of the scientific articles in the prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica and the ‘open source’ wiki encyclopedia wikipedia. The results may surprise you.

The Wikablog is a wiki about blogs, not like the BlogWiki but rather a directory of blogs compliled by users.
It’s early days but it will be interesting to see how this one develops.
Thanks to the cartoon Blog

UrbanMonastery describes itself as “a collaborative approach to finding ways forward in spirituality and life” and it looks like a very interesting and useful project. Go see. And if you’re interested in wiki, don’t forget about Compass, maybe the original Christian wiki.

HowTo Pray is a new article on Compass, the Christian Wiki by Dave, the blogger behind the excellent 42. Like all wiki pages, it isn’t finished yet. If you want to correct, amend or add anything, you can!

42 gets enthusiastic about Compass, and about the whole wiki thing. His example-based explanation of how and why it works is hereby filed under “I couldn’t have put it better myself”!
I’m grateful to those who’re getting involved in all this. Wiki works best when there is a community of folk making contributions, and that’s what [...]

A fascinating piece from Wired about the folk behind Wikipedia.
If you’re interested in learning about the wiki concept, this would be a good place to start.
Then you can join in at Compass!
(With thanks to Under the Sun)

Compass, the Christian wiki, is “getting there”. Most of the content has been brought in from the old version and i’ve been adding help pages to make it as easy as possible for new contributors. I’m preety sure that Compass 1.0 was the first specifically Christian wiki on the internet. There are a few others [...]